


The account of JN Sinombre

by Sionnan



Category: Cultist Simulator (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:15:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23352277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sionnan/pseuds/Sionnan
Summary: The physician remembers his patient, a young man called JN Sinombre who spoke of the pain and terrible beauty of the illumination of The House.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	The account of JN Sinombre

[The account of Janus Nemo Sinombre]

I think back on that young man, his wasted form dwindling in the box bed in the back of that old wooden church. I think of the sphinx's smile playing upon his pale lips, the glimmer in his eye that reminded me of a high fever, or the ardent glow of a madman. 

I think of the colorless gums, and the strange excitement pricked in me upon the sight of a bruise or the blood in his mouth. It was as though this inner radiance, normally seen only as a sparkle in his eye, were more visible in these small hurts. 

I think of pliability of his flesh, the way his muscles and fat seems to wither beneath it, even the sinews and tendons atrophying. I remember watching as he lifted a hand, and with the other drew the thin fold of flesh between thumb and forefinger nearly to his pinky. His gaze, at that time, was a steady, burning, palpable thing, as though a magnifying glass had been placed on me. "I have done terrible things," he said sincerely, with the same tone one might recite a mouthful of prayer.

I recall the night he summoned me closer than the straight backed chair I normally sat in during these last weeks of his dissolution. One pitifully thin hand had lifted from its spot on the patchwork quilt-- a strange, homely thing, when compared to the opulent sign of his many acquisitions of exotic and far off places, but gave me a rare glimpse of the man he must have been before-- and crooked his finger. 

I leaned over, eyes combing over his face, cataloguing the too fast breathing and the distant gaze. He whispered to me these word: "The stars are pricks in the skin of the sky, and the light we see is the brilliance of the pain pouring through. All life is a testament to the brilliance of suffering." 

I felt a chill course over me the likes of which I had never experienced before. When I sat back to take in his gaze again, his face had taken on the distant cast of an oracle.

\----  
I first met Sinombre-- though even then I knew that was not his real name, or suspected at the very least it could not be-- under the auspices of one of his followers. A young man with a sweet smile and eager, helpful demeanor, the kind of man whose surety lay in his knowledge of the mechanism of things, and that if one knew the mechanisms of these things, all could be fixed. Surely it was this kind of impulse that drove him to seek out the kind of person who knew the mechanisms of people, and so there he was in my humble office. He put a rather appalling sum of money in my hand, the kind of sum that possibly indicated something far more nefarious than a house call. 

I sputtered and told him that he may as well seek elsewhere if he thought I was going to divest some poor sod of an organ or two. Laidlaw, I recall the man's name now, looked momentarily perplexed, then slightly wounded, then he stifled a laugh and soothed my alarm. No, he explained, it was just that his-- he paused here, as though he were about to call his acquaintance one thing and knew he needed to settle for another-- his friend was very sick, and currently he simply needed the discretion of a very good doctor, as certain figures in our current regime did not look favorably upon his extra-vocational pursuits.

In that case, I said, lead on. There were any number of eccentric figures in this city who were persecuted for harmless if bizarre beliefs. I found this practice entirely tiresome and pointless, and took to divesting the morning paper of the society column, as it invariably contained several reports of the bureau of ministry of suppression and whatever flavor of oddity of the week. Usually nothing more threatening than seances, or perhaps if a group was feeling racy and incautious, a good old fashioned bacchanal. I went to medical school well before the advent of the suppresion bureau, and if the high minded figures there knew what kind of ribaldry the young ones studying at the feet of Aesclepius indulged in, they may very well ban the pursuit of medicine as well.

Laidlaw led the pair of us along the streets to a somewhat shopworn streetfront, dotted with staid old establishments, empty storefronts that had been to let many years ago, and tottering old tenements. Along this was an old bookstore, the painted name of the original owner still havig not been scraped off the front-- Mordland's. Even still, a small sign hung on a hook on the near window, in a woman's capable script, "Closed". However, Laidlaw produced a jangling keyring and let us both into the shop, which I could see was clustered with books, scrolls, parchments, and objects of strange and dubious nature. As we passed along one wall, we passed an ancient statue of one of the city's first saints, nestled precariously in among heavy volumes in many tongues.

Sinombre, Laidlaw said, was a clark at Glover and Glover-- surely I knew them?-- and had worked himself into a sickness. Standing at a back door of the shop, which clearly led to the upper floor, he rifled among his keys, tisking as he tried to hunt down the one that would admit us. 

Surely, I said in my most arid tone, Sinombre could not have enjoyed this name for very long under Glover and Glover, as they were a rather unimaginative firm. Laidlaw, pleasant as ever, offered a half shrug as he shook a key free from its tangle, and said he had only ever known the man as Sinombre. I began to feely slightly absurdly as though I were party to a secret errand.

Before Laidlaw could open the door, I could hear the lock disengage, and a woman of svelte and fetching proportions appeared in the dimly lit portal, though she emitted an aura of distinct and controlled danger. Her gaze cut like a knife, and she cast her unusually sharp gaze to my companion, who smiled at her. "I've brought someone to look at JN."

She arched one silent eyebrow, and then quirked her dark head up the stairs. "He's sleeping, I think."

We three ascended the rickety stairs that creaked beneath our weight, but strangely became muffled as we neared the top. The air at the landing had a still, weightless quality, the kind of atmosphere as though in a church nave. I swatted these notions from my mind as Rose sauntered forward and pushed opened a door that was half set in the jamb. Beyond her, I could see a narrow garret room, a single many-paned window of rippled glass that looked out across the rooftops of the buildings across the way.

Beside the window, a narrow brass bed frame was wedged into the corner under the slope of the roof, and on the bed lay the narrow, knobbly figure of a young man. I stepped in, peeling off my gloves and dropping them in my hat, and Laidlaw slipped in beside me, and stepped to the bedside. He knelt by the bed, and as I watched the two, I knew that these three were not merely friends. Their seeming closeness, and the near veneration that Laidlaw displayed as he knelt on the floor, was not a friendly gesture. Worshipful, perhaps?

He bent over the senseless figure, pressing his lips close to Sinombre's ear, one hand cupping the top of the head wreathed in a mass of sweat-plastered curls. Inside the sickroom, the stillness of the air seemed intensified. A faint smell of vomit hung in the air, and I could see a clean basin at the side of the bed.  
The man cut an insubstantial figure on that bed, timeless in some way. He had the pallor of skin of depictions of saints, and the flush on his forehead and the high spots of color on his cheeks reminded me unpleasantly of plagues of yore. He still wore his work clothes, though his shirt had been untucked from around his waist, and his belt had been unbuckled if not divested of. Unlike many fashionable young men of the time, he did not comb back his hair with product, and where the sweat did not mat down the locks, I could see he had soft waves of golden hair. 

I turned slightly when aware of an uncomfortable and penetrating sensation of being watched, and marked Rose, standing there and seeming slightly upset. "Has he drunk anything recently?" I asked her, thinking perhaps she had been nursing him. She nodded slightly, and said lowly, "He asked for a glass of water at dawn, but hasn't been awake since then."

It could simply be exhaustion as Laidlaw suggested, but I suspected it was more likely something infectious. The city was rife with flu, cholera, and typhoid fever, especially this sector that still relied on local wells rather than running water pipes.

As I stepped closer, I could finally see Sinombre's eyes were open, but Laidlaw had not yet stood. Their eyes both slid toward me as I moved closer, from their locked gaze. Laidlaw whispered something more into Sinombre's ear, and then stood, and said simply, "Wait a moment," and disappeared from the room. 

I fetched a sigh, glanced at the unnerving figure of Rose, and then with no other option, sat on the edge of the brass bed. Sinombre eyed me woozily, but there was a spark there that suggested either madness or a keen intelligence. I was assured of the latter when he croaked, "More Vauxhall than Harley street, aren't you." 

Impertinent fellow, I remarked to myself with some humor, but Sinombre coughed slightly and grimaced at the pain. "Don't worry, Doctor, I'm more of a Vauxhall fellow myself."

I peeled down the sweat soaked shirt and noted the hectic flush that formed a V over his pale chest. "Been able to keep down much food?"

He snorted slightly. "I can recall the times I've eaten in the last week on one hand. The last time I ate was three days ago, a pub down the street because the senior fellows at work refused to let the junior clerks pick through the left overs of a lunch with a client." He shifted uncomfortably on the bed, and sighed, "Greedy bastards."

While it was obvious he had a fever, I dug through my bag and slipped the thermometer from its glass tube, and popped it into his mouth. He made an unvoluntary gag around it, and I turned to him swiftly in case he was going to vomit, but he seemed to squelch it. "Nasty business," he said in a choked voice, muffled around the thermometer. 

I remarked on a book nestled in the patchwork quilt, the gilded letters proclaiming it cryptically The Locksmith's Dream, volume 4. Something about the title pricked something in the back of my head, and my mind set upon it like a bloodhound sleuthing out a scent, while my hands automatically pressed on the thin stomach below me, prompting a groan.

Scandal, my mind whispered to me, witchcraft. Abruptly, the anecdote in full tumbled into my head. The book was in fact rather recently published, as remarked upon in the society column years ago, but had been revoked by the publisher. 

"Teresa Galmier?" I asked, slightly incredulous. "What's a young clark doing digging through Galmier's works." My tone was amused rather than suspicious, and I retrieved the thermometer. A high fever. There was little doubt it was probably some kind of stomach flu. I pulled out my pad and began scribbling drugs for a chemist. 

I paused when I felt a slight tug at my elbow, and looked over. A strange intensity had overtaken Sinombre's face, and he said quietly, "When you know of the house without walls, you would cherish her words. We all visit that place twice in our lives. Once when we are born." The silence hung pregnant around us, the words he left unsaid clanging through my mind like a fire alarm: and once when we die. I was acutely aware of all the hair on my body standing on end, as though I had been galvanized. 

I finished the visit in a dull haze, my blood roaring in my ears, a strange chill on my lips. I left the quarters, and world outside that small, close shop seemed dull and drab by comparison. It took my several days before my dreams were not filled by a dark, endless void, filled with tiny, screaming pricks of light.

**Author's Note:**

> Work in progress. There is more. Where is it? Somewhere. I'll find it.


End file.
